Let’s say you have a VHD file you’d like to access while in Linux without attaching it to a Virtual Machine. There are many reasons you might like to do this, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do so with Linux.

The method I ultimately went with was vdfuse since I use VirtualBox. It allows you to mount any disk image supported by VirtualBox. Basically, if you follow the instructions at that the vdfuse forum link I just provided, you can mount the VHD to a mount point in your filesystem. Now, this alone doesn’t yet give you access to your files yet. It provides the partitions as standard files (and a file for the entire disk as well). The partitions are named Partition1, Partition2, etc. You can then mount the partition you want as a loopback device.